I wanted to tell him, but i won't do it

There is this guy who used to like me, and i liked him back but it all went to shit.

He liked me for a long time, and i always rejected him bc i didn't like him that way at the beginning (or at least i thought so) and we had an on and off friendship during that time.

Stuff happened, and i became severly depressed and just overall really sick in the head. I was really young, just turned 15 more or less.

At that time we were talking again, he would greet me every day and he would be super nice to me and i actually had feelings for him because everything else was fucking trash and he was the only thing that made me happy at that time, even tho i actually have no solid memories from back then. I was such in a dark place that my mind erased almost every memory i have from my teen years. It's like a void but i remember some little details.

I told him i liked him back, and we basically agreed to date. He was so fucking happy dude.

But then fear took over, and the day we were going to have our first date, i chikened out and i told him i couldn't do this. He got mad, like really fucking angry and he told me to stop playing with him, that we weren't kids anymore and basically he blocked me everywhere and we didn't spoke in a long time.

We are friends now, actually.

He once even "apologised" for being so corny and greeting me every morning and saying those cheesy pick up lines and he said that he feels sorry that he was so persistent and that i probably didn't like him even as a friend back then.
And i told him it hurt me that he thought that bc i considered him a bestfriend for a long time. Even after all that happened.
We are friends but not very close ones.

Sometimes... I just want to explain to him that i wasn't playing, i wasn't just playing along and joking when i said liked him. I did. I did like him a lot and for a long time. The reason i couldn't be with him was because I didn't want to mess up his life. I didn't want to ruin everything for him. I was so deep in my depression at that moment, and i just couldn't put all of that onto him.

I didn't even knew at that time if i would make it to the end of the day.

I just didn't want to make him carry the burden of having a partner who killed themselves at such a young age.

He was a kid. And so i was.

It's okay now, he is happy and he is dating a good friend of mine, and they are very cute and i am happy for him.

Sometimes i just wanna explain it to him, because i don't want him to think that i was playing with him, that i was so heartless, because i wasn't. But that would be removing and messing with a past neither of us want to go through again, so I'll just be silent.

This is it, sorry if it was long, but i just needed to take it off my chest.

I really liked u dude, but u deserved something better.